Wordpress Security Best Practices on Linux

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WordPress® is a great content management system (CMS), especially if you're new to blogging or coding. However,
due to the high number of WordPress installations, Wordpress has become a target for attackers. The good news is
that there are many steps that you can take to make your WordPress installation more secure.

Linux users and permissions

It's common for users who are new to WordPress to set their permissions wide open (set 777 permissions) when they see a
Permission Denied error from WordPress. This configuration allows any user (most importantly, the web server process) to
modify the files in your WordPress installation. To lock this down, we recommend that you create one user for each WordPress
installation as the file transfer protocol (FTP) user for the site. This article assumes that you have a single site and that
you name this server wp-user.

Use the following command to create this user:

sudo useradd wp-user -d /home/wp-user -m -s /bin/false

Note: We recommend that you use Secure Shell (SSH) key authentication only. If you plan to use password authentication for FTP, you must create a strong password for the user.

Set permissions

You should make a user, other than the web service's system user, the owner of the document root of your
site. You should also deny write permissions to the web service. The web service only needs read permission to serve content,
and assigning write or execute permissions to it leaves an attack vector for outsiders. However, because WordPress must be
able to upload files and update its own code, you need to bend these rules slightly.

For example, you should set the ownership of the entire directory as wp-user:www-data.

This setting means that wp-user has user ownership, and www-data (the system user for the Apache® web server) has group ownership. Depending on your operating system, this user might also be named httpd or apache. If you are using nginx®, the user is nginx. To set permissions, run the following command, replacing the example value /var/www/example.com/ with the document root of your site:

sudo chown -R wp-user:www-data /var/www/example.com/

Use the following base permissions for your WordPress installation:

755 (drwxr-xr-x) for folders
644 (-rw-r--r--) for files

These permissions grant wp-user the ability to modify anything, and the web server read-only access.

The following example show how to assign these permissions:

find /var/www/example.com/ -type d -exec sudo chmod  755 {} \;
find /var/www/example.com/ -type f -exec sudo chmod 644 {} \;

These permissions grant wp-user the ability to modify anything, and the web server read-only access. While this is common
practice for static sites, there are some files that WordPress must be able to access and execute to function correctly. The
following list shows the exceptions and the permissions that you need to set, assuming the same document root:

find /var/www/example.com/wp-content/uploads -type d -exec sudo chmod 775 {} \;
find /var/www/example.com/wp-content/upgrade -type d -exec sudo chmod 775 {} \;
find /var/www/example.com/wp-content/themes -type d -exec sudo chmod 775 {} \;
find /var/www/example.com/wp-content/plugins -type d -exec sudo chmod 775 {} \;
find /var/www/example.com/wp-content/uploads -type f -exec sudo chmod 664 {} \;
find /var/www/example.com/wp-content/upgrade -type f -exec sudo chmod 664 {} \;
find /var/www/example.com/wp-content/themes -type f -exec sudo chmod 664 {} \;
find /var/www/example.com/wp-content/plugins -type f -exec sudo chmod 664 {} \;
sudo chmod 775 /var/www/example.com/wp-config.php

WordPress uses these directories for system updates, theme and plugin updates, and blog attachment uploads (most commonly images).

WordPress admin user

Similar to the Linux® root user, your WordPress installation comes with an admin user. Because this is an administrative user that exists in almost every WordPress installation, hackers target it in brute-force attacks. The easiest way to close this attack vector is to remove the admin user. We recommend that you create a user with a different name, give that user administrator privileges, and then delete the admin user.

Secure updates

FTP is inherently insecure, especially when you are using password-based authentication. It is much more secure to set up SSH key updates instead of using passwords. Use the following steps to set up SSH key updates:

Ensure that the necessary packages are installed on your system. On Ubuntu® or Debian®, run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php5-dev libssh2-php libssh2-1-dev
Set up your SSH access, performing the following steps as wp-user. Because you disallowed login as wp-user, you must
open a shell by using the following sudo command:
```
sudo -u wp-user /bin/bash
```
Use the following commands to move to the wp-user home directory and set up SSH keys:

cd ~
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096
mkdir ~/.ssh; cd ~/.ssh
echo 'from="127.0.0.1"' cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub > authorized_keys
exit
Next, ensure that you set permissions correctly by using the following commands:

sudo chmod 700 /home/wp-user/.ssh
sudo chmod 040 /home/wp-user/.ssh/*
sudo chmod 644 /home/wp-user/.ssh/authorized_keys
Add the following lines to your /var/www/example.com/wp-config.php file:

define('FTP_PUBKEY','/home/wp-user/id_rsa.pub');
define('FTP_PRIVKEY','/home/wp-user/id_rsa');
define('FTP_USER','wp-user');
define('FTP_PASS','');
define('FTP_HOST','127.0.0.1:22');

You should be able to update WordPress, plug-ins, and themes without being prompted for login information.

Plug-ins

We recommend that you use as few plug-ins as possible to achieve the results that you want. However, we recommend that you use
the following plug-ins to promote security:

WP Security Pro: This is an all-in-one plug-in that has protection features such as login protection, malware scanner, two-factor authentication, and a firewall.
Disable XML-RPC: You can lock down XML-RPC by using an .htaccess file. However, unless you have a compelling reason to need remote control of your WordPress installation, it's better to disable it to prevent pingback attacks.
Disqus: Because the built-in user comment system for WordPress is very prone to spam, we recommend that you disable open registration. Do this by navigating to Settings > General, then unchecking Anyone can register. Then use Disqus to moderate comments instead and have users authenticate against their Facebook® or Google® accounts.

Updated 4 months ago